The following selection from the Principia Discordia illustrates the underlying philosophical foundations of the religion. It is, after all, more than just practical jokes and having fun- there is still the questions of why we are doing this.
In the year 1166 B.C., a malcontented hunchbrain by the name of Greyface, got it into his head that the universe was as humorless as he, and he began to teach that play was sinful because it contradicted the ways of Serious Order. “Look at all the order around you,” he said. And from that, he deluded honest men to believe that reality was a straightjacket affair and not the happy romance as men had known it.
It is not presently understood why men were so gullible at that particular time, for absolutely no one thought to observe all the disorder around them and conclude just the opposite. But anyway, Greyface and his followers took the game of playing at life more seriously than they took life itself and were known even to destroy other living beings whose ways of life differed from their own.
The unfortunate result of this is that mankind has since been suffering from a psychological and spiritual imbalance. Imbalance causes frustration, and frustration causes fear. And fear makes for a bad trip. Man has been on a bad trip for a long time now.
It is called THE CURSE OF GREYFACE.
Discordianism could easily be broken down to a constant battle against the Curse of the Greyface, trying to make right the imbalance between order and disorder. This involves not only creating disorder, or ignoring the authority of external laws, but it also means being freed from the order you impose on yourself.
Discordianism is not about taking out all the stops and living the completely uninhibited life, “Be nice to people; they outnumber you 5.5 billion to 1” (Book of Uterus). Rather it is about identifying the influences on your life and politely reminding you that this is YOUR trip and you get to decide what to do with it. What you do with your life does not have to make sense; it just needs to be what you want to do.
So throw out all your old misconceptions of how the world works, because we have far too much bureaucratic nonsense clogging up our minds. We have been duped by the Greyface into thinking that life is SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS, when in fact it can be whatever we want it to be:
The Aneristic Principle is that of APPARENT ORDER; the Eristic Principle is that of APPARENT DISORDER. Both order and disorder are man made concepts and are artificial divisions of PURE CHAOS, which is a level deeper that is the level of distinction making.
With our concept making apparatus called “mind” we look at reality through the ideas-about-reality which our cultures give us. The ideas-about- reality are mistakenly labeled “reality” and unenlightened people are forever perplexed by the fact that other people, especially other cultures, see “reality” differently. It is only the ideas-about-reality which differ. Real (capital-T True) reality is a level deeper that is the level of concept.
We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids.
A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it. The ORDER is in the GRID. That is the Aneristic Principle.
Western philosophy is traditionally concerned with contrasting one grid with another grid, and amending grids in hopes of finding a perfect one that will account for all reality and will, hence, (say unenlightened westerners) be True. This is illusory; it is what we Erisians call the ANERISTIC ILLUSION. Some grids can be more useful than others, some more beautiful than others, some more pleasant than others, etc., but none can be more True than any other.
DISORDER is simply unrelated information viewed through some particular grid. But, like “relation”, no-relation is a concept. Male, like female, is an idea about sex. To say that male-ness is “absence of female-ness”, or vice versa, is a matter of definition and metaphysically arbitrary. The artificial concept of no-relation is the ERISTIC PRINCIPLE.
The belief that “order is true” and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the ERISTIC ILLUSION.
The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered.
Reality is the original Rorschach.
Verily! So much for all that.
In one of my previous posts I alluded to Discordianism being similar to Taoism, and the above selection pretty much covers the overlapping philosophies. A central aspect of Taoism is freedom- freedom from the constraints of knowledge, language, and morality. Taoists like Chaung-Tzu and Lao-Tzu taught that our langauge never meets up with True Reality, and because it is arbitrary the values and knowledge that our language described are equally trivial. Since these labels and concepts are all arbitrary, we can dismiss them and search for the real Truth- The Dao.
The similarity is easy to see, both philosophies identify our values and perceptions of the world as contingent- we make them up as we go and no one is more Real than the other (though one can certainly be more human, etc.). Having established this, Taoism urges us to find the real Truth through meditation, but Discordianism has a different answer. Discordianism’s solution is not to search underneath our concepts for True Reality, but rather to be aware of the different grids through which we see the world in order to better choose our own, and to be more tolerant of other grids. We have no chance of seeing anything orderly underneath them, but that is no cause for dispair. Rather we should relish in our knowledge of how arbitrary our rules are, and in the natural chaos of Reality, despite the laws we try to impose on it:
NONSENSE AS SALVATION
The human race will begin solving it’s problems on the day that it ceases taking itself so seriously.
To that end, POEE proposes the countergame of NONSENSE AS SALVATION. Salvation from an ugly and barbarous existence that is the result of taking order so seriously and so seriously fearing contrary orders and disorder, that GAMES are taken as more important than LIFE; rather than taking LIFE AS THE ART OF PLAYING GAMES.
To this end, we propose that man develop his innate love for disorder, and play with The Goddess Eris. And know that it is a joyful play, and that thereby CAN BE REVOKED THE CURSE OF GREYFACE.
If you can master nonsense as well as you have already learned to master sense, then each will expose the other for what it is: absurdity. From that moment of illumination, a man begins to be free regardless of his surroundings. He becomes free to play order games and change them at will. He becomes free to play disorder games just for the hell of it. He becomes free to play neither or both. And as the master of his own games, he plays without fear, and therefore without frustration, and therefore with good will in his soul and love in his being.
And when men become free then mankind will be free.
May you be free of The Curse of Greyface.
May the Goddess put twinkles in your eyes.
May you have the knowledge of a sage,
and the wisdom of a child. Hail Eris.
Some people would have you believe that chaos is not a natural state, that it is something to be avoided, something that will destroy us. But remember what life was like when you were a kid- when everything was fun and rules were always impede on that state of mind. The lesson here is that there is equal value for chaos and spontaniety in our lives, it is an important part of the world around us. No matter how hard we try, the sense we make of the universe will only matter to us, and the rest of the cosmos will do as it damn well pleases.
Hail Eris, and God save the Queen.